


ventured a quest (to inspect why my heart's wrong)

by myriadThalassas



Category: Marvel (Comics), Moon Knight (Comics)
Genre: Childhood, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Fairy Tale Logic, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:48:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24216175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myriadThalassas/pseuds/myriadThalassas
Summary: "In very rare cases, they break outright, and no amount of medical brilliance or money or love will ever let a sufferer return to the way they were."Or: Marc gets his heart broken. He (and Steven, and Jake) journey up a pyramid to fix that. Vaguely inspired by The Snow Queen.
Relationships: Marc Spector & Jake Lockley, Marc Spector & Khonshu, Marc Spector & Steven Grant, Marc Spector & Steven Grant & Jake Lockley & Khonshu
Kudos: 5





	1. STORY ONE: THE MAKING OF HEARTS

For this story, let us start at the very beginning:

Once, when the world was new and there were less of us than there are now, each person’s heart was made personally by God: before the first ray of dawn He would rise to fire up his kilns, and until the last star appeared in the night sky he took part in the pleasurable toil of purifying and molding and cooling. So it went, every time a new child was to be born, and He was content indeed with the work of his hands.

One day, however, He found Himself at a loss, for He realized that the other vital component of Man—that is, a body, the numbers of which were never in His purveyance—had begun outstripping His output of hearts. “This is a problem indeed,” He declared, “but one I must discover how to remedy. To let someone be born without a heart would be too much to bear.”

He took the next moment to think, then, and in His wisdom he realized what had to be done. So He built a foundry up in the heavens and staffed it with His most meticulous angels, teaching them the long and careful process of making hearts—and so it has been ever since.

Yet angels are not God, and even the most brilliant of the heavenly host cannot help but sometimes make mistakes. So it was with a certain angel, whose earnest goodness did not exempt them from clumsiness—as when, while one day transporting the newest batch of hearts to be given on Earth, they did not notice, until it was too late, a heart slip from its place and split into four separate pieces.

“Oh, no!” the angel cried. Though it was no longer God Himself whose handiwork this was, each heart was tailor-made for each person, as it had been since the beginning; there was no mere _replacement_ of such a thing, but nor (in their mind) did they have the time to make another just like it. What were they to do?

They were still fretting when they heard footsteps; jumping up in haste, they simply pressed the heart back together, placed it back with the others, and went on their way. By the time it was shipped, the angel had half-forgotten their mistake already.

This was not the first time this had happened with someone’s heart; nor would it be the last. And that is why some people’s hearts break sooner and others’ later, even with the same amount of force applied.

(But what of _that_ particular heart, you ask? Well, that story is what happens next.)


	2. STORY TWO: THREE BOYS

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Marc Spector. He was 10 years old, a fact that made him feel very grown-up, and had brown hair and brown eyes the exact color of his favorite chocolate bar, which his father bought for him every Saturday after synagogue. He liked action figures, and the Chicago Bulls, and outer space, and a lot of other things, though he didn’t really talk about them to anyone—mostly because he didn’t have very many friends.

Maybe that would have made someone else sad, even at the venerable age of 10, but at this point Marc was used to being alone. And so, in the height of summer, when most children were together playing and swimming and laughing, the boy saw no problem with sitting by himself in the middle of the sidewalk, drawing. With fingers caked in a rainbow of dust, he conjured up moons and stars and planets, and of course spaceships to conquer them. Maybe, he thought, he should become an astronaut?

Considering this idea, the boy reached for his stick of white chalk. When he could not seem to grasp it, he looked to his left—the chalk was not there with the others—then to his right, where the sidewalk met the street.

“Oh,” he said to himself. “It must’ve rolled out.”

He got up, but too hastily. Head still spinning from the sudden shift, he took a step towards the chalk—and fell.

(The landing was hardly fatal, but for a while there are only two things: darkness, all-encompassing, and the pain in his chest that spluttered like a dying star.)

A distant voice. “—hey, is he okay?”

“That’s kind of a stupid question, isn’t it? He hasn’t moved at all since we got here!”

“What, so you think he’s dead _?”_

 _“_ I just don’t think we should rule it out! _”_

As conversation in this vein continued from what seemed to be light years away, the void that surrounded him gradually lightened into a gray. With a groan, Marc opened his eyes—and closed them—and opened them again, for what he was looking up at could not be real.

“Oh, you’re awake!” The first person he’d heard clapped his hands together. “You had a pretty bad fall.”

The second snorted. “That’s an overstatement.” His voice was rough for a child’s, almost sneering. “You just tripped over air. I hate to think what’d happen if you got hit by a car.”

A sigh. “You’re always so _morbid_ , Jake.”

“More realistic, you mean.”

“That’s not really what that means, but—”

“ _Hey_!”

The pair’s attention turned to the boy in front of them.

“Who—” He shook his head. “No. _What_ are you? Why do you both look like me?”

The two exchanged a look. “I think your first try was the right one,” the one on the right began, fingers playing with the hem of his polo shirt. “Anyway, I’m Steven Grant, and this is Jake Lockley. As for your second question…”

“… _do_ we?” The third boy squinted from under the shadow of his cap. “You’re way scrawnier than me, first off.”

Marc scrambled to his feet, conscious of an ache in his chest. The boy called Jake was staring down at him with folded arms, his face—Marc's face—pulled into a standoffish frown. "You're standing on your toes, though. And you're puffing your chest out!"  
  
"Hey, now." The one calling himself Steven elbowed his way between them, hands up. He couldn’t have carried himself any more different from either of them: neatly gelled hair instead of messy, straight-backed instead of a slouch, polo and jeans neatly tucked and pressed. Yet the boy recognized, past the layers of confidence he didn’t have, the other’s grin all too well. “Sorry, Lockley’s always like this. He’s all bark and no bite, though. Did I ever tell you about the time he…”

(Marc could not respond. One placating, the other raring for a fight, he instead stared at them both with the same mixed expression of fear and wonder. They—and he—were all alike, yet not entirely. They could have been triplets, if the other two had appeared ten years ago and not at this very instant.

A stab of pain right through his chest broke him out of those thoughts—and straight into another, more sinister one.)

“…I think you two are part of my heart.”

“…and then the dog chased him!…oh, what did you say?”

“Something about his heart or something, I dunno,” Jake chimed in. “Sappy stuff.”

“Oh, well—”

“I’m being _serious!_ ” He stomped the ground in frustration, hands curled into fists. “Dad’s told me about stuff like this happening—when someone falls or tumbles around too hard, bad things happen to their heart. They fog up or turn some weird color or…or—”

“In very rare cases, they break outright.”

The man that was walking leisurely towards them was long and thin, from his legs to his arms to his face; Marc half-expected him to collapse inwards like a tower of toothpicks. Instead, the trio watched in silence as he stepped; stopped; drew himself even taller. “They break outright,” the stranger repeated, his pale hands brushing an invisible speck off his immaculate suit, “and no amount of medical brilliance or money or love will ever let a sufferer return to the way they were.”

Steven was the first to dare to speak. “…so what happens to them, then?”

“Oh,” the other responded airily, “more often than not, they’re locked away; humanity, over the centuries, have figured out startlingly little about how to deal with the burden of the flawed-hearted. At the very least they no longer default to killing them.”

“Locked away?” Marc’s voice piped up, filled with utter terror. ”For how long?”

With his legs rigid, the man lowered himself, back curving as if in segments until his face was level with Marc's own. Bone-white skin ran taut from the tip of his nose to the rims of wide sockets, housing eyes that were dark and vast and empty.

( _Like the loneliness of outer space_ , some might have claimed, but he knew better. Marc had seen pictures of space, rolling across signs at the toy shops, flashing briefly on ads chattering away on the television. In space, one was never lonely; in space, there were stars and great clouds of dust, streaking comets and spinning planets. But in the eyes of this stranger there was no light nor motion; there was lack of all but depth, in which they were infinite.

Though his face did not shift, Marc knew that the man smiled.)  
  
"Forever and ever and ever,“ came the whisper. ”Until you grow old and gray and wither into dust. There is no hope nor future for one whose heart is flawed to your extent…well, unless you meet with God himself.“

“God?” Jake, who until then had remained as silent as a mouse, practically spat out the name. “What, you’re supposed to _pray_? As if he’d care about the sob stories of a handful of people when there’re literally billions of us!”

Steven looked at the other child in alarm; the man, meanwhile, merely smiled. “He doesn’t,” he agreed. “That is why, Jake Lockley, anyone looking for proper intervention must come to _him_.”

He raised his hand in an arc and stretched out one crooked finger towards the further end of the street. “If you wish to return to the way you were, walk in that direction until you reach a grand pyramid. There will be many doors, but you must enter through the one with a set of ram’s horns above it. Inside, there are several floors, and the top floor is the highest point in the world.” Thin lips parted in a razor-sharp grin. “God will surely hear your request there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know what I'm doing, but I hope it'll all turn out at least okay.


End file.
